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Colorado Art Ranch program examines role of humor in artistic expression

Mary Voelz Chandler

Published September 28, 2008 at 3 p.m.
Updated September 28, 2008 at 5:53 p.m.

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Roz Chast's The Everything Else Morning After Pill, 2003.

Photo by Julie Saul Gallery, New York

Roz Chast's The Everything Else Morning After Pill, 2003.

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast will speak Friday at the 'artposium.'

Photo by Suzanne DeChillo, The New York Times

New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast will speak Friday at the 'artposium.'

Chast's The End is Near, 1997.

Photo by Julie Saul Gallery, New York

Chast's The End is Near, 1997.

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The people in Roz Chast's illustrated world seem frazzled and anxious; they're singles, couples and families perhaps stretched to the end of their rope.

No wonder: Chast, a longtime staff cartoonist for The New Yorker, only has to look around her to fill her panels with slightly off-kilter perceptions of life today.

"No one in a cartoon is any one person," Chast said recently from her home in Connecticut, where she works and lives with husband (and humor writer) Bill Franzen and their two children. "It's my life. It's someone else's life. I blend a lot of things to express whatever works best."

She'll bring a whole village of her people and their often too-familiar situations, with her to a Colorado Art Ranch program this weekend in Denver that examines the role of humor in artistic expression. "What's So Funny About Art?" begins at 6 p.m. Friday and continues through Saturday.

Chast, the final speaker Friday, is logged on the schedule as using "her Theories of Everything to help us understand guilt, anxiety, aging, families, friends, money, and real estate."

She laughed. "Those are very important topics. Thanks to Power Point, I can take images and give a slide show."

And of course, talk about a career that shot her from graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting, to the next year becoming a staff cartoonist for a magazine that has continued to make that art form as important as the type that flows around it.

"They had a drop-off day for over-the-transom submitters. I was one. I didn't know anyone there. I didn't know that William Shawn was the editor."

When she went back to pick up her work, there was a note saying, "Come back and see us."

Now, she's part of a squadron of staff cartoonists who submit work once a week for a meeting where the cartoon editor and magazine editor make selections.

"I jot down ideas all the time," then when the deadline for the meeting approaches, make the actual drawings. "I need a little bit of a deadline," she said. "It's a way of focusing."

At talks, she said, questions range from how she works, to the magazine's weekly cartoon contest, where readers are asked to submit the caption to a cartoon drawn by someone else.

It's not her favorite subject.

"If they're doing it for cartoons, why not do it for short stories? The cartoonists I liked best had such a specific flavor and point of view," she said. Besides, "most of one's day is by committee. For a writer or an artist, it's so personal. How I think or how I feel, that's the point of doing the work."

Her verdict: "Gimmick."

Along with her regular contributions to the magazine, Chast has illustrated CD covers, theater posters and other writers' books. Now, she's working on her own.

"I've started to work on a new kids' book . . . I decided it is time to try my own."

Since the Colorado Art Ranch was founded about a year ago by graphic designer Grant Pound and his wife, Peggy Lawless, the organization has held programs around the state in rural areas, offering residencies and programs called "artposiums."

"We asked, 'What do we do for the second 50 years of our lives," Pound said by cell phone, while traveling the Western Slope exploring new venues.

The idea was to bring a lot of different ideas and disciplines together, without the expense of a home base. "We decided to be nomadic."

The upcoming program grew out of the belief that the role of humor has been overlooked in terms of its place in history. "It's sort of denigrated in the art community as not serious," Pound said. "We felt it was an important and serious part of human communications."

Besides, he says, "We figure out things we think would be fascinating."

Mary Voelz Chandler is the art and architecture critic. Chandlerm@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2677.

What's So Funny About Art?

* What: Program on the role of humor in artistic expression, with participants including New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, New Yorker writer Patricia Marx, Denver artist Bill Amundson, the Lab at Belmar executive director Adam Lerner, and author Brady Udall

* When and where: Begins 6 p.m. Friday and continues through Saturday; St. Cajetan's Center, Auraria campus

* Cost: $200, $150 students, includes reception Friday and lunch Saturday

* Information: 303-279-5198; coloradoartranch.org